MoU signed for Smart City Initiative

Odisha Channel Bureau New Delhi, Mar 17: Hitachi India Limited and Siemens Limited signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) in here today to form a consortium that would create pilots and replicate them for setting up 100 smart cities throughout the countryThe MoU was signed on behalf of Hitachi by their MD Ichiro Iino and Siemens Ltd MD Sunil Mathur and CII DG Chandrajit Banerjee in the presence of Secretary Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion (DIPP) Amitabh Kant.Speaking on the occasion, Kant said that while cities occupy only 3 % of the total geographical area of the world, they contribute nearly 80% of GDP and 2/3rd of global emissions.Hence, there was a challenge to do urbanisation in an innovative and systematic manner.Kant said that learnings gathered from the best practices across the world in the management of water, public resources, public spaces and technology etc shall be shared while implementing the smart cities concept in India.Kant said that the smart city initiative will be driven by technology.It is imperative that India embraces the global best practices in the management of cities and DIPP would be happy to collaborate in the roll out of the initiative, he added.Earlier, in his address, CII D said that this MoU provides a platform for coming together of leading technology companies such as Hitachi and Siemens and this will enable the implementation of vision of hundred smart cities.“CII would handhold a few select Urban Local Bodies in India through the preparatory phase to give a boost to the Centre’s flagship ‘smart cities’ scheme,” said Banerjee.CII has set up a “National Mission on Smart Cities” under the Chairmanship of Ravi Parthasarathy, Chairman, IL&FS and the objective of this Mission is to play the role of a facilitator and a thought leader to assist the Government in the process of the development of 100 Smart Cities by 2022.The MoUs are part of the implementation strategy to take forward the Cities initiative.Speaking at the occasion, Parthasarathy said, “The Mission would like to focus on three pilots to begin with, which can be internalised and used as a common template for scalability.” Since a Smart City initiative in any city would entail a host of sub components including transportation, responsive public services, infrastructure for employment, ICT, etc, it would be beyond the scope of any one organisation to deliver seamlessly across these requirements.The National Mission on Smart Cities has therefore decided to create industry-led consortia, which could render the full range of services for the development of a Smart City, in which Hitachi India Ltd and Siemens Ltd have consented to be the lead industry partner for the Japanese and German consortium.